You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

Still, this book is something solid that Eddie can hold in his hands, real proof that queer people exist, that he exists. Nothing good is coming to the women in this book—honestly, they’ll be lucky if the house doesn’t eat them or do whatever it is evil houses do in scary books. But they exist, and Mark noticed they exist, and Eddie can look at the words printed on the page and at Mark’s perfect penmanship and know that he isn’t alone.

There’s something so comforting in the ability to be wordlessly petty with someone, in knowing that as soon as you have a closed door between the two of you and the rest of the world, you can share all your least attractive thoughts.

Two men clink their mostly empty glasses, toasting bad luck. Toasting the fact that bad luck is both inevitable and impermanent. Even terrible things come to an end.

“It isn’t all bad. You get older, and things change. That’s the price of admission. You lose the people who knew you first, and then you start to lose everyone else. You lose your work. You lose the place where you grew up. You get things in return—new people, new hobbies, a chance to see everything new that the world has to throw at you. But you lose the things you’ve had the longest, the things that went into making you.”

“So, what, I should just accept that being with me could ruin everything for him?” “Fuck no, you should be furious about it. But what do you expect this guy to do? What do you expect any of us to do? We have to live our fucking lives.”